Amanda Peet Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis

Amanda Peet is opening up about her health.

In a new essay published in The New Yorker on Saturday (March 21), the 54-year-old Your Friends & Neighbors actress revealed that she was diagnosed with breast cancer “last fall.”

Keep reading to find out more…“For many years, I’ve been told that I have ‘dense’ and ‘busy’ breasts — not as a compliment but as a warning that they require extra monitoring,” Amanda wrote.

“I had been seeing a breast surgeon every six months for checkups,” she continued. “The Friday before Labor Day, I went for what I thought would be a routine scan.”

Her physician “didn’t like the way something looked on the ultrasound,” and, as a result, wanted her to undergo a biopsy.

“After the procedure, she said that she would walk the sample over to Cedars-Sinai and hand-deliver it to Pathology. That’s when I knew,” Amanda recalled, noting that her doctor shared the results the next day. “The tumor ‘appeared’ to be small, but I would need an MRI after the holiday weekend to determine ‘the extent of disease.’”

As Amanda waited to discover the type of cancer she had, her parents were both on hospice care.

“Our parents, long divorced, were both in hospice, on opposite coasts,” Amanda wrote, referring to her sister. “Our mother’s had started in June, but our father’s was only a week in, so we hadn’t expected him to go first. I flew to New York. I didn’t make it before my father took his last breath, but I got to see his body before it was taken from his apartment.”

Amanda returned home to Los Angeles to consider caring for her mother when she learned that her stage 1 cancer “hormone-receptor-positive” and “HER2-negative.”

“I was happier than I’d been pre-diagnosis, when I was just a regular person who didn’t have cancer,” Amanda wrote. “But after about 10 minutes, I remembered that I still needed the MRI and regressed to baseline terror. [My doctor,] Dr. K., said that the radiologist would check my lymph nodes, as well as ‘the left side for any surprise findings’ and call with the results within a week. It was dawning on me that cancer diagnoses come in a slow drip.”

Doctors soon discovered a second benign mass in Amanda‘s breast, requiring a lumpectomy and radiation as treatment.

This past January, Amanda‘s mother died, shortly after her own “first clear scan.”

“The morphine was taking forever to kick in, and she was looking at the ceiling and whimpering, so I climbed onto her rented hospital bed to get in her line of vision,” Amanda recalled of her final moments with her mom. “We locked eyes and she quieted down, and then she and I continued to stare at each other for what felt like several minutes.”

She continued, “I thought of my teen improv class, which she had found for me when we moved back to New York from London. In improv, even if the given circumstances defy logic, you and your scene partner have to stick to them. I wasn’t sure whether my mom knew that she was looking at me or whether I was just a constellation of interesting, disembodied shapes. I said ‘howdy doodle’—that’s how she often greeted me. But then I realized that she was communing without words, and I followed suit. Time was running out, and, besides, I had already told her everything.”

You can read Amanda‘s full essay at NewYorker.com.